Do we like Olaf Scholz?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful in his own words, a record that helped low-paid workers, and one unresolved tax-bank affair that he denies.
Scholz was born in Osnabrück in 1958, finished school in Hamburg and joined the SPD at 17. He was deputy chair of the party's youth wing through the 1980s, then worked as a labour lawyer. From there it was a long, steady climb: Labour Minister, First Mayor of Hamburg from 2011 to 2018, Finance Minister, and Chancellor from December 2021.
The stain on his record is the Warburg bank affair. While he was Hamburg's mayor, the city dropped a bid to claw back 47 million euros in cum-ex tax rebates from the bank, and a Hamburg parliamentary committee asked what Scholz's meetings with banker Christian Olearius had to do with it. Critics alleged he gave contradictory accounts of those meetings. He told the committee he had no influence on the case and no specific memory of the meetings. Reuters reported in August 2022 that Hamburg prosecutors had found no reason to investigate him, and no final finding against him turned up in what I read.
A second, smaller stoush came before the 2025 election. Focus magazine reported that Scholz had called CDU politician Joe Chialo a “fig leaf” and a “court jester” in his own party. The CDU called that remark racist, and Friedrich Merz demanded an apology. Scholz called the accusation “absurd and artificially constructed” and said he values Chialo as a voice in the CDU.
On the harm check, nothing nasty from him personally turned up. His coalition's Self-Determination Act, which replaced the old trans law with simple registry-office changes of name and legal gender, passed the Bundestag 374 to 251. His arms deliveries to Israel are where readers will split. In October 2024 he told parliament Germany would keep sending weapons, and where you land depends on whether you read that as defending Israel or as feeding a war.
Since leaving the top job he has been blunt about the far right. In May 2026 he wrote in Die Zeit that the firewall against the AfD is “more than justified” and told his successor's camp to drop minority-government talk. On a February 2026 podcast he called the AfD an anti-pluralistic party. He also said his own government should have done more on sanctions after the Crimean invasion.
The good stuff is mostly bread-and-butter. His government lifted the minimum wage to 12 euros in October 2022, which it said helped about six million workers, and brought in the Citizen's Basic Income. It also rolled out a nine-euro public transport ticket and big relief packages for energy costs. His government then fell apart, and he lost a confidence vote in December 2024 by 207 to 394, with 116 abstentions.